


the house of cannibals and evil bees

by sharivan



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-18
Updated: 2016-01-18
Packaged: 2018-05-14 16:28:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5750146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sharivan/pseuds/sharivan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He returns and the dogs are fine. He returns and loses all distinctions between nightmares and reality, wakes to bare feet on cold asphalt, bright lights, concerned strangers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the house of cannibals and evil bees

There is blood on his hands, on his glasses, everywhere. Fresh blood. _Real_ blood, not remembered or imagined. It smudges when he tries to rub his lenses clean on his shirttails.

He is covered in blood and shaking, wondering vaguely what design could possibly have led to one woman dying and another about to just as he and Hannibal arrived. Not a natural evolution of what Garrett Jacob Hobbs had done before.

But for now the killer is dead and the house swarming with agents and the daughter still alive so the goals of evil men can wait.

* * *

                                                                                                      
Will had liked lecturing at the academy. It had felt both useful and safe. He took advantage of the distance between teacher and students, teaching them how to think about killers without needing to acknowledge them as people with their own desires and goals. The cases they considered were in the past. No one pushed at Will, leaving his mind a mirror of their own.

When Jack Crawford of the self-assurance and baffling taste for the melodramatic appeared Will pushed back. It would end badly. Not for the investigation, but for Will. Still, Jack knew his own mind in a way Will always struggled to match and in no time he found himself on a plane bound for Minnesota.

It ended badly for nearly everyone, in bodies and questions and blood. He dreams of demon stags and dead brunettes.

* * *

                                                                                                      
“I’m not going to be comfortable with anybody inside my head,” Will tells Jack Crawford. His head is too crowded already, entirely too permeable. He doesn’t need to understand what he’s feeling and he certainly doesn’t need anyone else to understand. He needs walls that can stand between him and all the things that seep into his head. Therapists, in Will’s experience, are far too keen on taking walls apart.

But Jack insists. And a man is dead, a man is dead not just because of Will but shot ten times by his hand. He agrees to see Dr. Lecter.

Beforehand, Will takes precautions. There is nothing to gain from rushing into these things unprepared. He builds his walls. Shields, he’d call them, if this were a bad fantasy novel and he the swooning empath. He searches for new blueprints, for ways to say, see, I need this wall, without it I will crumble and be of no use, it would be cruel and unethical to try to dismantle it. Alas, resources meant to help a person lie to their therapist - in his case, a therapist who must take an unseemly academic interest in the workings of his brain in particular - don’t seem especially helpful. _Boundaries_ , though, are clearly en vogue even among far more forthright populations. The right vocabulary can work wonders.

Preparation is never wasted, but when he is presented with a letter affirming his sanity at the beginning of their session Will does wonder if his time could’ve been better spent. The questions that follow seem more personal than professional and he is surprised into telling most of the truth.

A lack of self-awareness was never Will’s problem. His adult life has been murder and torture and murder, looking too long and understanding too well. If he lacked the stomach to fire a gun as a homicide detective, well, that was years and years ago. Besides, there were far worse things about killing than the deaths of dangerous men. Will’s mind was too porous for his own good and for the last twenty years there’d been a whisper in the background warning that murder was addictive.

He didn’t say all that. He said only enough to be damning. Killing Garrett Jacob Hobbs…that wasn’t terrible at all.

* * *

                                                                                                      
His dreams are increasingly terrible. He wakes shaking and covered in sweat from dreams of blood and nightmare stags and, again and again and again, the man he killed. The dogs whimper and worry at him. His new colleagues do much the same, Bev with less tact than the wildest stray. It’s kindly meant.

* * *

                                                                                                      
The girl lives. She lies like she was born to it, gives away nothing she doesn’t intend to. “You killed my dad,” she tells him, not “you saved my life” or “you were at the house.” She’s so terribly fragile with her scarves and hard-won control and Will wants to teach her better ways to hide. He wants to teach her to fish and to watch people and he wants to go far far away so she can recover and never pull a stitch jumping at the sight of him. It seems cruel that his first attempt at parenthood would be for a girl nearly grown when other people got to practice on babies. Babies couldn’t remember your early mistakes. Babies wouldn’t even notice who you killed. But then they required more constant attention than he could manage.

Hannibal is tied in knots over Abigail too, so that’s something. Even Alana, who can be dispassionate in this as those who’d been present as Abigail bled out in the kitchen of her childhood home could not, seemed fond of the girl. She’d be fine.

* * *

They returned to Minnesota, a teenager accompanied by more psychologists and profilers than one woman could possibly need. Will’s low hopes for the trip proved overly optimistic. Oh, the neighbors feared Abigail like a demon they could finally recognize; hard for her, expected for her keepers. That’s nothing. Will dreams he’s the one holding a knife to Abigail’s throat, that he finishes the job and kills his almost daughter. His dreams are hard to shake without a dog to demand attention.

Things get worse when the body is found. The whole case is _wrong_ , almost cursed - two copycats, so close to the original’s hunting grounds, so closely mirroring the original? It was a sensational case but still, the copycats were so perfectly timed, acting when the investigators were conveniently at hand. There was something … but then perhaps Will’s own obsession with the case was clouding his judgement. Awake or asleep there was no end to the parade of young dead women, and their dead killer, and the nightmare stag that hunted them all.

* * *

                                                                                                      
“There’s something so foreign about family, like an ill-fitting suit,” Will tells Hannibal at their next session. “I never connected to the concept.” It doesn’t seem particularly desirable. What does family bring but group delusions? Certainly Abigail’s family had done her no good; the runaways too might never have turned to murder without families of origin and of choice to magnify everything.

He leaves Hannibal a key so he can feed the dogs while Will’s chasing after troubled children.

He returns and the dogs are fine. He returns and loses all distinctions between nightmares and reality, wakes to bare feet on cold asphalt, bright lights, concerned strangers. Fugues brought on by nothing in particular are new and unwelcome. It seems less a failure of his walls, more a failure of the ground they’re built on.

Hannibal’s office has become familiar over too many nights of drinking and talking over cases.

* * *

By the time Will arrives at Hannibal’s house the sun has risen. He waits until Hannibal’s handed him a glass of carefully prepared coffee to ask, “Could it be a seizure?”

It’s not the question he’d lead with in different company. He could, of course, have gone to the ER - the cops who picked him up would probably have taken him there more eagerly than they’d driven him home. Will found himself unwilling to expose his failures to any more strangers and came instead to Hannibal, who might lack MRI equipment but had the advantage of some familiarity with Will’s mind.

“I’d argue good old-fashioned post-traumatic stress,” Hannibal tells him before going off on a tangent about devil’s bargains and Jack Crawford.

Will tells him, “Jack isn’t the devil,” but Hannibal seems unconvinced.

* * *

Later, Will asks Hannibal, “You trying to alienate me from Jack Crawford?” His answer is unconvincing.

Later, Will finds himself reading advice meant for people whose friends date terrible people and wonders if Jack or Hannibal is the Darth Vader in this situation, or maybe Will himself. Maybe they’re all just dragging each other down.

Later, Will tells Jack that he may not be useful much longer, that “I can make myself look but the thinking is shutting down.”

He dreams of demon stags and wakes to constant headaches.


End file.
